On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama signed The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or Recovery Act, into law. Federal News Radio follows how agencies have enacted the law and how the government is tracking spending through Recovery.gov.

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Amtower interviews David Shea, Director of the GSA Office of Charge Card Management. The Federal SmartPay program (the credit card program, not to be confused with SmartCard) accounted for over $30 billion in FY 2008 with over 100 million transactions. There are three basic types of cards and one integrated card: fleet, travel, and purchase are the basic cards, and some agencies have integrated cards which allow multiple types of activity.

The purchase card, which allows front line personnel to quickly acquire products and services to accomplish near term tasks, accounted for $19.2 billion. The travel card, with 2.2 million users, accounted for $8.3 billion and the fleet card $2.5 billion. SmartPay 2, which rolled out last year, is a ten-year program with many new services for federal agencies including debit cards, prepaid cards and stored value cards. There is also a provision for the use of the SamrtPay card in the Recovery Act (stimulus spending) in section M-09-15.

The SmartPay program accounts for hundreds of millions in cost avoidance by avoiding the arduous paper-based procurement process. It also earns each agency rebates, which in FY 2008 totaled about $190 million. Banks offering services under the contract are Citibank, JP Morgan/Chase and U.S. Bank.